I built my own. Thats the cheapest way. You want to take your time when building your PC. You wanna hit all the online stores, and even a few mom and pop stores, sometimes you can find a deal or two there. Ebay, Pricewatch, Newegg, Directron,Amamax, all online stores that you cant afford to not take advantage of.

1.) Mother Board and Processor Combo (199.99+shipping on ebay)
Asus A7N8X Deluxe nForce2
AMD 2400 XP Proccesor (1.94ghz)

2.)DDR RAM 512mb (48.00+shipping on ebay)

3.) Video Card (64.99+tax)
GeForce Fx 128mb 5200

4.)ATX Case (65.50+arm/leg)
Colorcases.com has the coolest cases, however they took 2 months to send the case. Heres a link to my case. Its pretty badass. But NEVER order anything from these guys. I'll link the consumer report on these guys too.
http://www.colorcases.com/cases/imag...er/spider6.jpg

After all that is aquired, you could do like i did and use your old drives. If not, there are cheap drives out there. The moral of the story is, my computer is pretty badass, and it was dirt cheap. There are ways to break the laws of Retail. You just have to look.

Another thing, If your buying something from an onine store, you want to research that re-seller/online store at the following website. This is also where you can see the TERRIBLE reveiw of colorcases.com

http://www.resellerratings.com/seller2071.html